Slowly slowly catchy money

Once you’ve decided that you want to start making money on the internet there is a tendency to rush into signing up for every affiliate scheme, PPC scheme and SEO scheme out there. You’ve got a great idea and you want the world to know all about it as you start planning your holiday to the Bahamas. Well stop right there, Buster, and listen up.

Now I’m no online financial expert. I just checked my wallet and I have around $50 in it. No credit cards as they’ve all been cancelled. No overdraft as my bank closed my account. What the Hell do I know about anything? Only what I’ve learned so far in trying to make some money online and my pain could be your gain.

When I first saw the light and decided to try to make some money online I rushed out and spent a lot of time and money on trying to earn a quick buck. Now some schemes suggest that you’re going to make a million dollars overnight. You won’t. It takes hard work and effort regardless of what anyone tells you.

My first couple of sites were filled with affiliate adverts, AdSense blocks and very little else. A couple of months down the line and my sites had cost me the price of the domain name (not a lot as I used GoDaddy to register the domains but it was still an outlay), the cost of signing up to the “Get Rich Quick” schemes and all I had to show for it was a couple of dollars. Hardly a good return on investment.

What had I done wrong? I’d followed the steps, as far as I could see, but had earned hardly anything. Well I’d made the cardinal sin in setting up an online enterprise. I’d rushed into it.

Where does all your traffic come from? 95% of it will come from the search engines and online directories. How long does it take Google to index your site? It can take up to 3 months. Do the online directories like websites full of affiliate adverts and AdSense? Nope.

In my rush to make my first dollar I’d lost sight of what I already knew. The 7 P’s. Proper Planning and Preperation Prevents Piss Poor Performance. I’d rushed to get the sites out there and had expected to retire overnight but all I’d done is create a couple of really shitty websites full of adverts which, in truth, if I stumbled across them I would have clicked off the site immediately. So what have I learned?

Plan your site. What are you trying to sell? Why should people visit your site? What will make them come back?

Do not fill your site with adverts from day one. The occasional AdSense or product placement is fine but do not build a site purely for affiliate advertising. Well not at first anyway 😉

Create the site, submit it to the search engines and online directories and then resist the temptation to fill it with adverts for the first 3 months.

Review the site. Would you stay on this site if you were sent a link to it? If not then neither will your customers.

Update the site. There has to be a reason why people come back to your site. If you give them everything on first visit, what is their incentive to return? If you’re writing a Blog then there is no excuse not to update it daily.

3 months is a good timeframe to work with. As I said, it can take up to 3 months for Google to fully index your site and a lot of the free web directories quote the same sort of time. Once you’re indexed it’s time to up the ante but be patient. It will start to pay dividends.